PAUL CHARLTON is a partner at Steptoe & Johnson LLP. He was a career
state and federal prosecutor, appeared often before the Ninth Circuit, and
served as the former U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona.
STEPHEN RICHER is an associate at Steptoe & Johnson LLP. He previously
worked as a Washington, D.C., think tank analyst, a journalist, and an
entrepreneur.
In a federal courtroom in the early 1990s, a new assistant U.S. attorney prosecuted an elderly Navajo male charged with
attempted homicide for having cut his wife’s throat from ear to ear
using a pair of sheep sheers. The defendant was convicted of the
charge, and on the day of sentencing, the defendant, who spoke not
a word of English, used a Navajo translator to assist him. As part of
the colloquy for the district judge handling the sentencing, the judge
asked the defendant: do you have any questions for the prosecutor?
There followed five minutes of dialog between the translator and
defendant before the defendant finally looked, with recognition, at
the prosecutor, spoke with the translator, and the translator responded to the judge: no, I have no questions.
As the translator left the courtroom, the assistant U.S. attorney
stopped her and asked why such a seemingly simple question had
taken five minutes to answer. It was, said the translator, because the
Navajo have no word for “prosecutor,” and the concept of prosecu-
tion by the government was unknown to this elderly Navajo. Instead,
the translator had to reach back to a more familiar concept for the
defendant: The Navajo Long Walk to Fort Sumner, a murderous and
deadly affair led by Kit Carson in which hundreds of Navajos died as
they were forcibly removed from Navajo lands. “I asked the defen-
dant,” said the translator, “if he had any questions of the man from
Fort Sumner. And then he knew who you were.”
By geography and jurisdiction, we know that story, tied to a tragic
history, will never repeat itself in any other state or federal court-
house, save one in Arizona. Were there an appeal of that case, even
today, it is unlikely that the defendant would have drawn a Ninth
Circuit judge who would have had any concept of the defendant’s
cultural reality.
A desire to have a bench that knows us and our culture, a culture
Splitting the
PRO
BY PAUL CHARLTON & STEPHEN RICHER
Arizona Deserves a Fair Deal
Split the Ninth Circuit
—continued on p. 36
